That was about the time Lott noticed something else: A solitary figure sitting in the back of one of the patrol cars.

At the heart of the madness was Aldon Smith. The 49ers linebacker was arrested and booked on suspicion of making a false report of a bomb threat. He posted $20,000 bail Sunday night, according to multiple reports.

Lott, the 49ers' Hall of Fame defensive back and pillar of the team's glory days, didn't learn it was Smith until he got to the security line. An agent told him: "Hey, one of your guys was just here."

The agent explained, without divulging the name of the player, that a football player had allegedly been belligerent and uncooperative at the Terminal 1 screening checkpoint. The player indicated that he was in possession of a bomb.

Eventually, Lott found someone to tell him that the man in question was Smith, who has already had several run-ins with the law.

"I felt bad for him," Lott said in a phone conversation Monday with the Bay Area News Group. "He's got so much ahead of him as a person. Forget football -- as a person.

"I'm worried about him as an individual. ... I'm sure that the people that are working with him with the 49ers will do a good job. They have very good people."

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Lott, 54, played for the 49ers from 1981-90 and is remembered as one of the great locker room leaders in team history. He said Monday that he learned as a rookie from veteran players like Hacksaw Reynolds, Willie Harper and Charle Young that players had a responsibility to represent the organization even off the field.

"Those guys let you know that if you were going to play for a long time, 90 percent of it was going to depend on your capacity to make decisions,'' Lott said.

Lott, throughout the course of his career, kept a close eye on the way players comported themselves. Former running back Roger Craig, in a separate phone interview Monday, said that Lott was known to call a players-only meeting to clear the air if players behaved badly off the field.

"Ronnie was our CEO. When he talked, we listened," Craig said. "And what we would do as football players is take ownership as a team and say: Let's stop this kind of stuff."

Lott on Monday said he has met Smith just once, before the playoffs at the end of the 2012 season. Keena Turner, one of Lott's former teammates, arranged for the two to have coffee.

Lott said that he liked Smith and thought he seemed quiet and polite. He said their discussion centered around "finding out how to be the best you could be."

Now, he hopes Smith, 24, can get his life back on track.

"I'm always amazed because you work so hard to get there (to the NFL),'' Lott said. "But once you're there, you have to figure out how to do more: You have other responsibilities. Now that you're there, you have to be responsible."